What Constitutes Entertainment?

[Fire_Fly 499]

I'll be the first to admit, a good laugh and a good song are both important in my day-to-day life, but when was the line drawn to cut jokes and music away from the "mortal" media?

 

Every day, another video is uploaded somewhere, by a person hopeful to gain some sort of acknowledgement for openly expressing his or her ideas and beliefs, maybe even with the ambition to unite others under those ideas and beliefs and form a few stable connections to like-minded individuals. And yet, for every one or two views these purposeful videos receive, there's literally thousands, and sometimes millions more accumulating for a video about a squirrel holding a lightsaber...

 

I don't have a single problem with parodies and videos created for the purpose of simple comedy, but I have to wonder what the standards are for entertainment nowadays. What does it say that debates and conceptual exchanges are losing out to videos about talking food? Is it as simple as us seeking lighter and less thought-provoking forms of entertainment, or is it another way that people are changing with the times?

 

I'm interested in hearing what everypony thinks about it. What do you all look for in entertaining videos, and why?

[Swordfishtrombone 384]

I look for things that can make me laugh, teach me something cool and interesting or make me think. And thats what I would call entertainment.

[RazzyJam 1,519]

You bring up an interesting point. I think that people are becoming less and less interested in thought provoking media for a number of reasons. The world has this funny concept of what is appropriate to show as comedy to certain viewer groups. Think about what kind of television you watched when you were young. What kind of messages do you think it carries? I know I watched a lot of cartoons and things such as spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents (I find it funny how I watched Tara Strong then, and I watch her again much later in life on a show I dont think i would have wanted to be caught dead watching). While these shows did have some intelectual adult humor hidden in them at the time I watched them, I was to young to pick it up. I ended up watching it for the crude humor. This crude humor is then what the kids in my generation seem to find funny, as we are not adept to look for the intellectual humor. We are exposed to new shows with more vulgar language and even dirtier humor because thats what we learned was funny: South Park, Family Guy, Tosh.0, all these things that work on crude, unrefined, shock humor. Its kind of miserable to think about. Fortunately, there are those of us who were able to secure other intrest through other Media. I gained an intrest in science and Engineering at a young age, and now the knowledge i have gained allows me to find entertainment in more adult, mature Material. I watched shows like Zoom and things of the more educational nature more often than cartoons. It really all depends on what people are exposed to.

 

The most horrifying part of all this is that companies monazite off this, and continue to pump junky crude humor media into the world because it makes money. Its almost a paradoxical cycle.

[I used to be a stranger 7,993]

An experience which a person enjoys partaking in, that provides a blend between anesthetic and aesthetic stimuli.

Such as the changing of sound between tones and silence in music,

Action and inactivity in a play or movement and stillness in a movie, etc.

[Tteok 16]

For a Youtube video to interest me, it has to involve cats, good music, or babies (of any species, and also including moe and anime-ish stuff that uses the same big eye, small nose and mouth formula as babies).

[Fire_Fly 499]

You bring up an interesting point. I think that people are becoming less and less interested in thought provoking media for a number of reasons. The world has this funny concept of what is appropriate to show as comedy to certain viewer groups. Think about what kind of television you watched when you were young. What kind of messages do you think it carries? I know I watched a lot of cartoons and things such as spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents (I find it funny how I watched Tara Strong then, and I watch her again much later in life on a show I dont think i would have wanted to be caught dead watching). While these shows did have some intelectual adult humor hidden in them at the time I watched them, I was to young to pick it up. I ended up watching it for the crude humor. This crude humor is then what the kids in my generation seem to find funny, as we are not adept to look for the intellectual humor. We are exposed to new shows with more vulgar language and even dirtier humor because thats what we learned was funny: South Park, Family Guy, Tosh.0, all these things that work on crude, unrefined, shock humor. Its kind of miserable to think about. Fortunately, there are those of us who were able to secure other intrest through other Media. I gained an intrest in science and Engineering at a young age, and now the knowledge i have gained allows me to find entertainment in more adult, mature Material. I watched shows like Zoom and things of the more educational nature more often than cartoons. It really all depends on what people are exposed to.

 

The most horrifying part of all this is that companies monazite off this, and continue to pump junky crude humor media into the world because it makes money. Its almost a paradoxical cycle.

 

That's an interesting way to look at it. In a way, shock humor-oriented cartoons have built a foundation of dependence on our standards, causing us to seek out the familiar brand of humor that we've been exposed to at a young age. All the time, I would notice these seemingly-out-of-place mature humor or references to some obscure idea that it was obvious children wouldn't understand. For a long time, I wondered why, and it was at the formation of that question that I became interested in other brands of entertainment. I felt like there was this completely new world of media that I knew nothing about, and the deeper I looked into the more mature sense of entertainment, the harder it became to look at some of my favorite childhood cartoons in the same way.